


Paso Robles

by PaxVobis



Category: Metalocalypse (Cartoon)
Genre: California, Chickens, Dethkids, Ficlet, Gen, I Believe I'm A Chicken, POV Second Person, Preklok, Snakes N' Barrels, Summer Vacation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-25
Updated: 2018-08-25
Packaged: 2019-07-02 10:26:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 961
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15794640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PaxVobis/pseuds/PaxVobis
Summary: Ain't nobody here but us chickens.





	Paso Robles

It’s 1981 and you’re on a ranch in Paso Robles.

It’s 1981 and you are thirteen and you’re on a ranch in Paso Robles.  Last year you were in London – and now you’re in California.  It’s warm here, and the Americans are laid-back; your hair is getting long, below your earlobes, and your mother even says you can pierce your ears if you want.  So that means she intends to stay for a while, living with the new guy.  The LA guy.

He’s got a big house in LA and a big record collection and even room for you, y’know, he’s an industry guy and he’s your mom likes him so – for a while it was good.  Being in this warm country with these warm, friendly Americans, and a school with no uniform and basketball and new mates, and being thirteen and into real cool music and all, and no more David Bowie around anywhere.  But then the summer came, and with it the holidays, and now you’re on a ranch.

Actually it’s a vineyard.  The LA guy’s parents own it and they’re nice enough to you, though they talk to you like you’re five and not thirteen – in fact come October you’ll be fourteen, and that’s a whole teenager plus some.  The ranch itself is all wood floors and cowhide and the parents drawl and make you repeat words to hear your Brummie accent.

“Where you from again, boy?”

“Birmingham.”

And laughter.

“Say again, Tony?”

“Birmingham.”

“Burrrrrrmin-hm!  Dang, say it again.”

But they’ve set up the guest room specially for you, with a quilt on the bed and an acoustic guitar.  The meals are huge, homecooked and delicious.  It’s lonely, no one but the parents and workers, but the sunset over the grapevines is stunning.  And it’s not England.  It’s America.  It’s something else entirely.

The quilt on the guest bed has chickens on it. 

There is not much to do on the ranch but they’ve given you a few jobs around the place, and one of them is feeding the chickens first thing in the morning.  You never wake up on time and the woman, her name is Margaret, she pounds on the door to wake you up and yell at you until you get dressed, and then she makes you wolf down a massive home-cooked breakfast which is nearly cold because you overslept, and then she shoves you out the door to feed the chickens and the sun is still rising on the horizon.  So you go to sleep seeing chickens and then you wake up seeing chickens and then you stand in the pen in your wellingtons casting handfuls of corn out for chickens, sweeping a leg out after them in a lazy, half-hearted kick, scattering them clucking, and you clucking after them, repeating under your breath like the Meters, “Just keep on struttin’,” and miming a legendary bass line with your fingers or sitting on the overturned feed bucket and slapping your knees to the rhythm.

On the first day you cursed at them and ditched the feed at them, but by a week in you were starting to warm to the ladies.  Your life in Birmingham and London didn’t have many animals, the occasional street cat or a police officer’s horse, the ever-present squirrels and pigeons.  In California it’s different, and here there are the chickens.  They’re okay, you decide, like the noisy women in the backstage chorus lines or dancing troupes the way they chat amongst themselves, and the longer you sit to watch them – and you take your time with the next task, which is gathering their eggs to bring back for Margaret, since there’s nothing else to do – the more you notice the little lives they have.  Yes, even chickens have their own business to attend to.  It takes a lot of setting, getting chicks to hatch.

You imagine them waddling around like the seamstresses your mother worked with.  By week three you’ve named them.  Agatha.  Meryl.  Susanne.  Porky.  By week four, you can pick up the fat black one, Josephine, and place her on your lap and she just stays there, letting you stroke her feathers.  When you’ve managed to wag off work and the ranch itself is too quiet, just you alone while the folks are out on the vineyard, the hen house is company, the ladies chatting to each other.  And next year, when you are sent here again – when the LA guy turns out not to be so nice, but his parents still look after you – they’ll talk to you, the chickens, and you’ll sit here and watch them, and imagine you are a chicken too, a big fat rooster with gorgeous iridescent feathers living on a sunny vineyard in California, and nothing to worry about ever.

After the band breaks up, and after you leave your first wife in Washington, you’ll use the settlement to buy your own ranch out Modesto way.  California will have seeped into your blood, and while you can’t bear to walk through the shadows cast across the pavement in Los Angeles, you can never leave it for the yearning, the cold that creeps, the Mamas & Papas refrains that get jammed in your head like a busted tape deck long after those go out of fashion. 

Maybe it was in the needles you jabbed into yourself for over a fucking decade, or maybe not.  It’s here now anyway.  And you won’t have chickens, just vines, because you’ll still be too fucked up to have any animal that doesn’t scream when it needs feeding.  But every fucking dawn you catch, smoking your insomnia away on the front porch, you’ll wish you did, and picture yourself a rooster like the weathervane on your roof again.


End file.
